Basti
by Intizar Husain
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Pub Date Dec 26 2012 | Archive Date Jan 22 2013
New York Review of Books | NYRB Classics
Description
An NYRB Classics Original
Basti is a beautifully written reckoning with the tragic history of Pakistan. Basti means settlement, a common place, and Intizar Husain’s extraordinary novel begins with a mythic, even mystic, vision of harmony between old and young, man and woman, Muslim and Hindu. Then Zakir, the hero, wakes to the modern world. Crowds gather. Slogans echo. Cities burn. Whether hunkered down with family or furtively meeting to exchange news with friends in cafés, Zakir is alone in a country lost to the politics of loneliness.
Basti is a beautifully written reckoning with the tragic history of Pakistan. Basti means settlement, a common place, and Intizar Husain’s extraordinary novel begins with a mythic, even mystic, vision of harmony between old and young, man and woman, Muslim and Hindu. Then Zakir, the hero, wakes to the modern world. Crowds gather. Slogans echo. Cities burn. Whether hunkered down with family or furtively meeting to exchange news with friends in cafés, Zakir is alone in a country lost to the politics of loneliness.
Advance Praise
"The uncharitable might say that but for the past, Intizar Husain would not have had a future. But truth to tell, the man who blends the personal with the impersonal, specific with the universal, actually has the past much to thank for. Be it drawing generously from the Jataka tales or the Panchatantra fables or even the layered Shiite tradition or the more modern existentialism, his tomorrows have been taken care of by yesterdays. Yet Intizar Husain does not live in the past, so much as he draws from it. His nostalgia is not comforting, there is that disquiet air that runs through his works, and Basti, arguably the finest novel on Partition, is no different. Distance in time often diminishes emotion, but in Husain’s case it only serves to distil it: what goes away is the peripheral, what is retained is the essential." —The Hindu
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781590175828 |
| PRICE | $17.95 (USD) |
